May I invite you all to please scroll down on the link below and vote for my student, Dennis Medina. He’s written his way to the finals of a Take America to College, a Gates Foundation effort to bring the voices and struggles of non-traditional students to legislators and policymakers in Washington. He’s a Boston police officer on the gangs squad and a student in my midnight College Writing II class this semester Bunker Hill Community College. Click and listen to his story. Heck, listen to them all.

Vote early and often for Dennis. Tell your friends. Post any and everywhere. Voting ends Tuesday, March 2. Thanks.

I shall continue my crusade to persuade the Williams trustees to open the doors for a few such students. BHCC has two students thriving at Amherst, one at Dartmouth, one at Columbia, three at Smith. The deadline for transfer applications is coming up, and BHCC has fine students applying now to all these and more. Never give up, and this is a tough one.

The Gates Foundation believes that the U.S. can make no better investment than in these motivated students, who know the value of education and are in school yet face nothing but obstacles. Interesting that this is an issue Gates has picked of all issues, not just education issues. Gates has several initiatives going for these students.

Gates hired PurpleStates to collect videos for this project, See below. The idea is to raise the voices of these students in Washington. The whole project is on the home page

Your interest beyond a vote is great. My suggestion, as Einstein may have said, is to keep things as simple as possible and no simpler. Go to your local community college, find the president or dean of arts and sciences, and offer to teach a course or be a tutor. Just be a tutor a few hours a week. Save one life at a time. You’ll fall in love with the students.

My warning is what my friend Lyn Marino says (she has taught at Hartford Community College for 25 years), “Wick, if they’re not breaking your heart every day, you are not doing your job.” Lyn’s husband Steve, Williams ’76, has been a public high school teacher all those years. Williams gave him a Bientennial Medal. He now teaches a course each semester, too, at Hartford Community College. Community colleges are union shops. Mine is NEA and you do need a master’s degree to teach, according to the contract. My MBA works for teaching English. Bunker Hill President Mary Fifield has real work to do and has seen her share of liberal do-gooders. She gave me a night shift in the tutoring center. I now see this was a test. I kept coming back, and the English department gave me a section to teach.

Here is the dilemma. The mess Dennis and the other nine are in is huge, immense, beyond description. There are 1,177 community colleges in the U.S. and, depending on how you count, six million or more Dennis’s with similar struggles. Yesterday, I helped a student from Eritrea, who escaped to Ethiopia and on to Boston, with his college essay. To Amherst. As a fact in the essay, this student dropped in that he’d been arrested, jailed, beaten, tortured and almost strangled. That’s just one. In theory, I’m frustrated that his friend, similar story and a BHCC student, is already at Amherst. That student’s sister, also BHCC, is at Smith. Williams visited once three years ago and has not replied to subsequent invitations.

But here’s the point to which we must apply our own educations, Williams or otherwise. The Ivies, Williams and friends, depending on where you draw the self-described most-highly-selective (SDMHS) line, amounts to only about 50,000 undergraduate seats. Symbolism is important in leadership and as a matter of leadership and the symbolism that requires, Williams and all ought to do a lot better. But look at the numbers. Even giving all 50,000 seats to Dennis, for the nation, is not going to solve much with 6 million and more in need.

The public policy challenge is that we have to make the 1,177 Bunker Hill’s more like Williams than the other way around. Go visit your local community college. See what you can do. Do not give money. Give time with students and faculty. There is a movement for philanthropy at community colleges. That can never scale up and cannot, as the situation has become, be an excuse for lousy public policy towards these students. This one is a matter of giving our brains and our skills and making eye contact with students like Dennis. No one has ever taken an interest in these students’ lives. Letting these students know that you think they wrote a good paragraph really can do what the invention of penicillin did.

PurpleStates and Gates very much have in mind for this project using video to get these students’ stories out for the world to consider. So far, so good.